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The KKF Cookbook Thread

It looks like we have enough interest to make this work. I've taken a look at Blurb as a way to produce this, and I think we can make it work. Here's a rough outline of what I envision happening.

1) We will make a book as a forum. This will not be my project; I'll just assemble it with as little editorial control as possible to make it work (e.g. if I have to cut text to make it fit on the page, I will, but I won't be deciding based on whether I like how you write). Your recipe is your own.

2) We can publish it through Blurb and put it up for sale there. This has lots of benefits. First, no one has to front the $2000 it would cost to publish an initial run of 50 and then take on the headache of distributing them. Depending on what direction we take this (see my suggestions below), the book will likely cost between $40 and $50 per copy. We might be able to get it done for slightly less. We would price these at cost with no markup.

After the initial run of 50, the book would become available to the public and late-coming forum members at a slight markup. The proceeds from that markup would be donated back to KKF, since it's the entity that brought us all together.

3) I envision this book as 50 recipes written by 50 different authors. Each author gets 2 pages: one for the recipe with photos of the dish, one for knife pics and a blurb on why/how you used the knife you did. This means that we have to work with some limitations. We can't use 6 page recipes no matter how great the dish is, and each recipe has to feature one knife. You can use as many knives as you like, but you can only write about one of them. We'll then leave 10 to 15 pages for "extras": introduction text, perhaps a feature or two by either one of the vendors or one of the pro cooks, etc. That's a total of 115-120 pages of printed text and photos.

4) I think most of us would like to see a decent distribution of both knives and types of courses in this project. 50 recipes for coq au vin featuring 50 different gyutos probably doesn't make a lot of sense. With that in mind, I would suggest that as far as possible we try to include different recipes and different knives, and I am willing to serve as a kind of clearing house for this. That means that if you want to submit a steak au poivre with a Hiromoto gyuto and someone else has already claimed both the dish and the knife, I'll suggest that you pick a different submission featuring a different blade.

On knives, my initial allocation suggestion would be as follows: 15 featuring a gyuto, 14 featuring a slicer or petty, 14 featuring a single bevel of some sort, and 7 featuring cleavers. This is absolutely negotiable.

5) In terms of who gets in, I honestly don't know how I want to do this yet. I'd like to give priority to people who have been around for awhile and made good contributions, rather than to the "best" recipes. Unless we're absolutely overwhelmed with submissions, though, I don't want to impose a post count. I'll set up a gmail account (probably KKFcookbook@gmail.com or something like that) for submissions. Once I know what we've got, I'll let those who submit recipes know the specs for both their text and their photos. If you commit to doing one of these, please make sure you are set up to carry it out. Cell phone pics won't cut it!

Okay, that's my initial suggestion. I highly encourage feedback, so anyone who wants to change anything should pipe up in the next week or so.

Once we've got consensus on the formatting aspects, I think we just take suggestions. I'd like to make it first-come first served, but everyone should have a backup recipe/knife or two in case someone submits something very similar ahead of them.

Maybe someone with Lightroom or Photoshop skills can volunteer to tweak the photos so they all look the best that they can? That would be a big benefit, as people dropping $50 on a cookbook are going to hope it is close to coffeetable quality.

The great thing about Blurb is that once we make it and put it up for sale, we can make as many as we want. I'd be happy to price as many as we want at cost, but once we sell a certain number to contributors/forum members I'd like to mark it up a little bit and donate the proceeds back to KKF. 50 was an arbitrary number.

This is an awesome idea!
Do you have an idea for a page and font size? Restrictions or guidelines for layout and number of images? It would be helpful to create template or couple sample pages just to give people an idea of what theyre working with. How does the layout for the book work? Is it a certain file type or does it all just go through an online tool?

Maybe google documents would be a better alternative to email? That way everyone could see and share before the final draft.

Oh yeah, Also: I have adobe LR and would be willing to help out with some of the photo editing and photography.